If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.

All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.

Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?

A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.

Isle royal isn’t very easy to visit. But the parks department operates 2 “national lakeshores” in MI that everyone should see. Sleeping bear dunes is west of traverse city and is super accessible and close to lots of lodging in TC. Pictured rocks is perhaps my favorite place on earth. But, driving up to the UP is a bit of a trek.

This is a real rogues gallery of internet. And… a soccer team from Detroit. What the fuck did those guys do?

What is that top image from? Why is he wearing a Michigan State shirt?

Another vote for home assistant. It is not just the best FOSS option, it might just be the best option altogether.

Some advice, think carefully about what you want to achieve with automation before you start. Take some time to draw up what you are going to do before you buy anything. Think about extensibility and don’t force yourself to lay out big money and time all at once. Will Smith (tested.com, tech pod, not Independence Day) recommends doing one room at a time and focusing on spaces that are primarily yours first.

Things to consider: If you live with other people, it might be wise to make everything transparent. Meaning the light switches still turn the lights on and off on demand etc.

Wi-Fi is sort of a poor solution to communicating with devices, especially ones that don’t have access to mains power all the time. Consider if you are going to deploy zigbee, z-wave, or a matter mesh. Matter, being very new would be challenging but it is clearly the future of low power wireless communication for home automation.

Set a goal that NOTHING requires a external service or internet connection and stick to it. That might mean giving up on some types of devices but it’s YOUR house, not google’s.

Think automation first. Phone and voice control is cool. But having things just happen the way you would want without have to do anything is even cooler. Be smart about complexity though. How would things have to change if your partner started working a different schedule for instance?

Finally, get creative. Lots of silly problems can be solved with this technology. My favorite automation turns the damn hot glue gun off after 30min so my kids don’t start a fire if they get forgetful after a craft project.

All computers are named after dogs. My dogs, dogs in the family etc. the dog name should be carefully match to the computer’s role and characteristics.

My peerlessly reliably golden retriever will almost always have a server named after him. The most powerful computer in the house is named after the monstrously large golden my parents had when I was young. My sons gaming pc is fast but perpetually broken, named after our greyhound. Laptops are named for smaller dogs, SBC devices get named after toy size dogs.

Wi-Fi ssids should always be named after cats.

This is the natural way of things.